"Don't glorify me. Glorify the men. This is all about getting their stories out."
-- Donovan Chapman

He's six-foot-three and in breathtaking shape. His handshake is firm, his conversation polite, peppered with "sir" and "ma'am." Frankly, it's a stretch to take Chapman at his word when he insists that he was once "the skinniest, smallest kid in town."

Not only that: With a deep tan complexion that betrays his mother's full Hawaiian lineage, Chapman was targeted by other boys who weren't used to seeing anything so exotic in Farmerville, Louisiana. His father, a Vietnam veteran who kept his memories to himself, didn't spare the rod at home. And as he grew up, Donovan also shouldered responsibility for protecting his younger brother and sister from local bullies.

Maybe he was too busy to feel any urgent pull toward music during those early years. He did strum his mother's ukulele and sing the Hawaiian songs she taught him, though, and he learned his way around the drums by banging away at a set he'd stored in the tool shed out in the yard. "In the wintertime I'd dress up in my hunting clothes, with these big mittens," he laughs, "then I'd go way back there, where I wouldn't be heard in the house." Though he plays some mean guitar now, he still thinks of the drums as his first instrument.

But outside of playing drums each Sunday at the Assembly of God church, music didn't offer any particular shelter from the harsh winds that blew through life at the foothills of the Arkansas Appalachians. And so, when he was old enough to enlist, on May 6, 1992, Donovan joined the Air Force. He was seventeen.

"I can't honestly say it was patriotism that brought me into the service," he admits. "Who really understands patriotism at that age? All I can say is that I felt a call to get my young butt out of there and grow up. There was so much in the world I wanted to see. What's going to make me feel whole? Where can I find my niche? I didn't know if it was in the military, but I did know that would be my vehicle to find the answers I needed."

His eleven-year stretch began in Minot, North Dakota, where he was assigned to guard and transport nuclear warheads. He bought his first Alvarez guitar there and took it with him to Kunsan, South Korea and, after that, to Hawaii. But when he elected to train there for the pararescue team, everything in his life took second place to getting through that uniquely grueling course. With a ninety-eight percent failure rate among applicants, he knew he would be challenged -- but not beaten.

"They run you ten to fifteen miles a day," Donovan explains, "beginning every morning at around four o'clock. Until noon it's nothing but grassy guerrilla drills, which means they beat you to death. You're hosed down on a hot tarmac, doing flutter kicks with your face in a mask filled with water. They make you do flutter kicks in the mud at the bottom of a riverbed. You carry a zodiac boat with you everywhere you go. At noon you go to lunch, but you don't eat much because you've got six hours of pool coming up. You swim a lot underwater -- four thousand meters, and you have to make it in a certain time. You're holding your breath during long exercises underwater, everything from tying knots on a rope that's weighted down to doing gear preparation underwater, and if you get it wrong you go back down, put it on, and tread water with weights. They tie your hands and feet together, and you have to go down and bob up like that; they call it drown-proofing …"

And every Monday, the distances were lengthened, the times shortened, the weights made heavier. "How do you get through three months of training when the standards get harder and your body keeps breaking down?" Donovan asks. "It's mind over matter, gentlemen. Your body tells you that you can't get through it, but this" -- he points to his forehead -- "tells you that you can. Everything I do now is mind over matter. I can be president someday if that's what I want. But no matter what happens, I'm not going to let anyone tell me that I can't achieve my goals. Negative. It ain't gonna happen."

Pararescue training culminated at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, where for six months all the underwater, skydive, medical, and other training was put to the test in survival and simulated combat situations. In the end only a few are left standing, and Donovan was among those who lined up in combat boots and full blues, at graduation, finally able to don the maroon beret to symbolize their accomplishment. "That was the proudest moment of my life," he admits. "You hear, 'Ladies and gentleman, here are you new pararescuemen.' You're locked to attention with your medals, stone-faced, as you see these flashes going off and you hear the crowd cheering. It almost makes you want to cry because you're standing among heroes, who accept they're going to put their lives on the line. You're absolutely on top of the world."

"Do I care about being the top-selling new country artist? No, not really. I care about how many people I can help love their children, spend more time with their families, and have more of a personal relationship with God."
-- Donovan Chapman

From that stage Chapman went to Kuwait on the first of a series of deployments during his last three years of service. He helped to save lives and stayed at the side of friends as they lost theirs. His training served him well, but even for pararescuemen there are limits, and the day came when for the first time he questioned whether he could continue to fully execute his duties. For six hours he knelt by his cot, praying, tearful, and asking for guidance. That night he slept well, and the next day he wrote his first song.

The more he wrote, the more Donovan felt that something was calling him to service again, this time to honor those who had trained with him, become fast friends, risked and then lost their lives far from home. Eventually, this drew him to the roof of his bunker in Afghanistan, where he wrote "There Is No War," a tribute at first to his fallen colleague Jason Cunningham, as fighters screamed overhead toward combat. Sometime after that, in a helicopter tearing through deep darkness on an assignment to rescue a wounded civilian from an area teaming with Taliban, Donovan started to scream.

He'd remembered that his only copy of "There Is No War" was stored in his computer, back in the bunker -- and that PJs made it a point, when one of their comrades died, to wipe his hard drive clean.

"I realized that if I went down that night, nobody would hear that song," Donovan says. "So I prayed. 'God,' I said, 'I'll make a deal with you. You know I'd rather die before any of the other men. If that's the way it has to be tonight, that's cool with me. But this song is important to me too, Lord, so while I don't want to ask for anything that's unfair, please get me back alive, at least tonight, so I can record it.'

"And He did," Donovan adds. "He'd given me a new mission. I came back home with maybe half a dozen songs, which I took right to Nashville and started to record. And when I'd heard three months later that my commander and five of my crewmembers had died when that same helicopter I'd flown in with them had crashed as they were on a mission of mercy, I dedicated 'There Is No War' to all of them too. It's a song now that glorifies not me, but all the men who'd been killed in action, especially these half dozen friends of mine."

Eventually this determined young man met Mike Curb. Donovan approached the fabled record executive as he would his former commanding officers: "I told him, 'You're going to get the same professionalism and code of ethics out of me that I had eight months ago in the military.' I'm in a war, man. Just give me a task. You say, 'Don I need a round of carts in the parking lot.' I'd take that mission and figure out the quickest way of doing it. That's the way PJs are. And I don't change. It's who I am."

Which takes us back to There Is No War. Like comfort to the wounded, this album is intended to bring hope to lives spent now in darkness -- and to bring it on wings of infectious, upbeat rhythm or heartfelt balladry. "I want every human, no matter what race, from the child of five to the grandmother at ninety-five, to be fulfilled by this music," he says. "God has placed me to be a mirror and reflect the things that matter in life, to be a diamond that the light shines through. I'm His tool. And that's my mission."

Mission accomplished? Bet on it. The proof is in the soul and sound of Donovan Chapman.